Virtual reality can make different possible futures feel personal.

Using VR, participants can travel across generations.

Climate damage can become a lived experience with VR.

In an experiment, carbon footprints fell after the VR experience, and some effects remained six weeks later.

You begin as a child. Through the windows of a virtual home, animals graze in a green field. A parent sits nearby while the television reports on climate change. Then time advances. You are older, and so is your parent. The room has deteriorated. Beyond the glass, fires burn in the distance.

Time jumps again. Now you are the parent. A child turns to you and pleads for their future. The television is dead. Outside, the landscape has been emptied.

Then comes one final journey, 50 years ahead. This future is different. In a virtual museum, you learn that mass public pressure forced political leaders to act. The worst outcome was not inevitable after all.

This is an experiment designed to investigate a difficult question: Can people’s environmental attitudes change when the future is no longer something they merely hear about, but somewhere they feel they have lived?

Turning distance into experience

Climate change presents psychologists with an unusual problem. Its causes stretch across countries, industries, and generations. Many of its most severe consequences lie beyond the horizon of everyday life. A graph can show rising temperatures, but it cannot easily convey what it might feel like to age inside a changing climate, or to explain that change to a child who must live with it.

Virtual reality offers researchers a way to manipulate this psychological distance. It can place people inside........

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